Perform
Capturing Candidness
This is Reading Photographs, a newsletter for those interested in remarkably mundane photographs and why the details, ideas, emotions, memories, connections and beliefs they arouse make them meaningful.
My oldest is performing in her first “real” production this week. Newsies. She plays an old lady and her one line is telling one of the newsboys that she’ll buy a paper off him. And right now she1 is experiencing her first ever tech week and, well, let’s just say it’s pretty rough for a near ten-year-old to be up until 10:30 to 11 pm every night.
She’s always been a performer, which is not surprising given that her mother was heavily into drama in school and was part of a Rocky Horror Picture Show troupe in college for a time.
And because the kid is a performer she is notoriously difficult to get candid photos of. I quickly learned to not say her name when trying to get her to turn around for a photo once she outgrew the toddler phase because she would immediately ham it up. Of course, there are the obligatory parental photographs that require poses—when everyone’s dressed up for Easter, birthday party gatherings, weddings, etc.—but sometimes you want to catch folks in the moment. As they are.
Eventually, I learned to apply the skills I developed taking photos for the newspapers I worked for to my snapshots at home: catch people when they are already doing what they love. And since she loved to perform, just get photos of her performing. This was one a few different puppet shows she put on when she was much smaller. No discernible plot, except for the one where she adapted the story from A Day In The Life Of Marlon Bundo, but they were entertaining to watch nonetheless.
I wish I had better zoned the light meter with this photo box so you could see the puppets more clearly. Or maybe I just needed to sit closer, because the front of the box/theater being fuzzy is driving me particularly nuts. But that’s the thing about candidness: you gotta shoot from the hip and hope for the best.
Well, all of us are experiencing her first tech week, hence the brevity of this week’s newsletter.